Biomedical Applications of Bayesian Networks

Abstract

The central role played by uncertainty in medical decision making explains why medicine was amongst the first areas where applications based on Bayesian networks were developed. Biomedical research is firmly grounded on statistical methods; new methods are adopted only slowly by the field. During the past decade, however, Bayesian networks have become important tools for building decision-support systems in medicine and are now steadily becoming main stream. More recently, Bayesian networks have also been adopted as analytic tools in human biology, mainly in research that aims to elucidate the biological mechanisms underlying disease. In this paper, we review some of the applications in both medicine and human biology and we make an attempt to unravel some of the characteristics of Bayesian networks in biomedicine.